Pokémon Go and Niantic to be sold to Saudi-funded firm for $3.5 billion claims report

Yet another games company is being swallowed up by a larger competitor, as the maker of Pokémon Go is reported to be in talks with the publisher of Monopoly Go. It may not make quite as many headlines as it used to, when it first launched almost nine years ago, but Pokémon Go is still hugely popular, with a recent increase in popularity bringing in over 100 million monthly players.

The game isn’t made by Nintendo or The Pokémon Company, but by American studio Niantic, who also make a number of similar titles, such as Monster Hunter Now, Pikmin Bloom, and their first game Ingress. None of the other games have ever been anywhere near as popular but Niantic is not thought to be in any kind of financial trouble and yet reports suggest they’re in talks to sell off their game business to the Saudi-owned mobile publisher Scopely, for a cool $3.5 billion.

Scopely is also an American company and its biggest hit at the moment is Monopoly Go! That was launched in April 2023 and only two months later Scopely was acquired by Savvy Games Group, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF).

The Saudi Arabian PIF has made a number of video game purchases in recent years, including sizeable stakes in Nintendo, Take-Two, EA, Embracer Group, and rumoured discussions with Ubisoft. This is intended as a way to diversify the country’s economy; it also comes as outside investment in gaming has seen a drastic decrease around the world, which has been one of the key causes of the ongoing layoffs across the industry.

None of the companies involved have confirmed the deal but a Bloomberg report suggests that if it goes through then Scopely will immediately take ownership of Pokémon Go. This won’t necessarily have any immediate effect on the game, and most players will probably not notice the change, with no indication that Scopely want to change Pokémon Go in any significant way.

How they might feel about the other games is less obvious though, as Bloomberg notes that repeated attempts to mirror the success of Pokémon Go have led to a number of cancelled titles over the years, including Harry Potter: Wizards Unite in 2021. Niantic already signed a deal with Savvy Games last year to bring Pokémon Go to the Middle East, which is no doubt when the idea of buying the company was first floated.

Savvy boss Brian Ward has previously suggested that the company was interested in buying a ‘genre-leading’ mobile game as the ‘tip of the spear’ for its mobile portfolio, implying that Niantic is not the only company in his sights. As for Niantic, it was originally a spin-off from Google and was never originally intended to be a games company. Instead, it started off experimenting more generally with geospatial data and last year started talking about new tech that could capture and share 3D scans of real-world objects and locations.

That seems like it would have plenty of applications for video games, although it may be that Niantic ends up selling access to the technology rather than making the games itself. Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter, and sign-up to our newsletter.

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